Original Bergischer Engel: Starting her Business with 17

30. January 2019

This is Johanna Witkop around the time she founded “Original Bergischer Engel”. She had been only 17 back then. In 2019 she celebrated her 90th birthday. Starting a workshop right after the Second World War, that was very different from today. Winter 1945/46 was very cold, people were starving and freezing. Mrs Gruner-Witkop’s family used to sell porcelain, but it was all destroyed, all gone. So Josef Witkop, Johanna’s father, remembered the skills of his daughter. She was good at fretwork art and good at drawing and painting, too. That was the beginning of “Original Bergischer Engel” in Solingen-Wald. They sold their first wood toys around Christmas 1945, but it took some time before the new workshop got officially registered.